VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Administrator's Guide (September 2002)

Chapter 7, Creating Volumes

Creating a Volume Using vxmake

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If each column in a RAID-5 plex is to be created from multiple subdisks which may span

several physical disks, you can specify to which column each subdisk should be added.

For example, to create a three-column RAID-5 plex using six subdisks, use the following

form of the vxmake command:

# vxmake plex raidplex layout=raid5 stwidth=32 \

sd=disk00-00:0,disk01-00:1,disk02-00:2,disk03-00:0, \

disk04-00:1,disk05-00:2

This command stacks subdisks disk00-00 and disk03-00 consecutively in column 0,

subdisks disk01-00 and disk04-00 consecutively in column 1, and subdisks

disk02-00 and disk05-00 in column 2. Offsets can also be speciﬁed to create sparse

RAID-5 plexes, as for striped plexes.

Log plexes may be created as default concatenated plexes by not specifying a layout, for

example:

# vxmake plex raidlog1 disk06-00

# vxmake plex raidlog2 disk07-00

To create a RAID-5 volume, specify the usage type to be RAID-5 using the following

command:

# vxmake -Uraid5 vol raidvol

RAID-5 plexes and RAID-5 log plexes are associated with the volume raidvol using the

following command:

# vxmake -Uraid5 vol raidvol plex=raidplex,raidlog1,raidlog2

Note Each RAID-5 volume has one RAID-5 plex where the data and parity are stored.

Any other plexes associated with the volume are used as RAID-5 log plexes to log

information about data and parity being written to the volume.

After creating a volume using vxmake, you must initialize it before it can be used. The

procedure is described in “Initializing and Starting a Volume” on page 181.